Re: Why ra_serf should not (yet) be the default WebDAV RA implementation

On Mon, 2008-11-17 at 00:46 -0500, Karl Fogel wrote:
> The depth-first constraint has always been there, and I think it was
> added mainly by instinct (Jim Blandy's, though many of us felt the same
> way at the time). It may be that he wanted to be able to make
> guarantees about the "size" of the edit not exceeding the depth of the
> tree at any given time or something like that.

There was some discussion about this in September and October of 2000.
At the time, we were creating the "XML editor", which we knew would
never survive to see the light of day. The proposed DTD for the editor
was hierarchical (<open-dir> <open-file> ... <close-dir>) which meant
that the editor drive had to be depth-first in order for the XML editor
to be streamy.

If that sounds like a bad reason to restrict the editor API, there were
people who thought so at the time too! See:

http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2000-10/0038.shtml

I believe Greg Stein was also pushing for a random-access editor
contract at the time. However, Jim Blandy in particular had other, more
theoretical reasons for wanting depth-first edits. He articulated them
in:

http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2000-10/0041.shtml

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Received on 2008-11-18 19:34:33 CET